 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, closing up the night with an impromptu speech, so let me just give you a quick rundown. I think it was like 11 years ago, I met, I met our Paul, and we just started chatting and, and we kind of became friends, and I said to him, hey, you want to write a forward for a book on social engineering? And he's like, yeah, sure, let me read it. And he did. And he wrote a really, really great forward from my very first book, which you may have noticed that if you have read that book. We kind of kept in contact through the years. I'm super excited that our Paul is also one of the trainers that we have coming to the SE Village in Orlando in 2020. So I'm really excited about that because there's going to be a whole like three hour session on, on exactly the little teaser you're going to get here for 30 minutes. And it was just the other day he was texting and saying, we were texting each other like in Vegas. And he's like, I'm in Vegas. He's like, you want to hang out? I'm like, sure. Why don't you come and hang out with me on stage at DefCon? And that'd be kind of cool, right? So he is, so he's here. So please join me in welcoming our Paul Wilson from the Real Hustle in the UK. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. All right, warm group. Nice. Welcome. So this is kind of an impromptu thing. And I thought, what do I want to talk about? And usually when I do these talks, I spend a bit of time figuring out what the slides will be, creating a structure. But when you're in Vegas, most of the time is dedicated to drinking and gambling. And, you know, a couple of nights ago, really how this all happened was I was wondering, I was alone in my cell wondering, who do I know who would bail me out, return for a talk. One of the things that happened to me, I'm not a religious guy, if you are, that's perfectly okay. Not entirely sure if I believe that we're all in a simulation. Maybe we are. But part of the evidence I have that we might be is that somehow life allowed me to perform more cons and scams than any other human being in history. That doesn't mean I'm the greatest con artist in history, because the worst con artist in history would be the guy who has to perform more cons and scams than anybody in history. Because if you get good at something, you just keep doing it while it makes money, and eventually you get caught or you retire, right? That's what normally happens. What happened to me was I got really fascinated with this stuff when I was about eight years old. And I was exposed to magic and cons and scams pretty much at exactly the same time. And the fascination grew, and eventually as my understanding grew, the two kind of diverged. So I am a magician. I love magic. It's one of the things I spend a lot of my time doing. But I'm also fascinated with how cons, scams, and cheating methods work. And I'm a collector of these things. There are people who are serious experts that dedicate themselves to one particular type. Well, I like to explore everything. And a few years ago, we were involved with a movie. The movie starts with Esther Stallone and some other people. It was about cheating, the people we made the movie with. We went out to Hollywood. We said, you know, we'd like to try and use some of this in a reality show. And we had a show called The Take Down. The Take Down was myself and a bunch of friends. None of us were serious gamblers, so we were allowed, by the gaming control board, to go if the casino agreed and cheat for apparently real money on the casino floor. And my friends and I, we would always joke about it because none of us were professional gamblers or professional cheaters, but we were using methods that we always wanted to try. So somehow life allowed me to do that, which was really interesting. By the way, we used to call ourselves the gang who couldn't cheat straight because everything was the first time. We always went out there for the first time and sometimes we got caught and sometimes we didn't get caught. But the most interesting thing was the dialogue that we had afterwards with the casino staff and with the casino managers. Explaining what it was we were doing, why we were doing what we were doing. And amazingly, even though these guys had been going to seminars in the industry, we were somehow ahead of them. Now that's because we knew the right people. We had really interesting information. That led to me being asked to consult on a possible BBC show. I went over, we did a little video with a couple of people who were maybe going to be on the show. I ended up on the video saying, well, that's not how you do it. That's not what you would say. It would be like this. And the BBC said, you know, that guy's really good looking, but the fat guy looks like he knows what he's talking about. So I ended up with that job and we ended up doing a show called The Real Hustle. I know you've seen The Real Hustle. I think almost all of it is on the internet these days. And it started off the first series, you find out how it works. How do you go out there? How do you really do this? And the first rule we came up with, Alex and I really wrote the entire show. We would go through everything that we had seen and say, well, I want to try that scam. I want to try that scam. I don't want to try it. It was like Christmas for someone like me. This is where I began to believe, you know, maybe something's going on. How did I get this job? And I want to tell you a little bit, first of all, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I did before that, a couple of things I did that I think are interesting and some of the things we did while we did that and some of the things I've done after. I was always interested enough to go out and try some things that I probably shouldn't have tried. For example, I like playing poker. I'm not the world's greatest poker player, so if there's a game after the show tonight, if you want to join me, I'm sure you've got a good chance. But I thought, you know, I'm learning all these moves, made it an opportunity just to try them. I mean, not to actually cheat, just to, you know, instead of dealing off the top, I'll just deal off the bottom. I don't know what the card is. It's not really cheating. And I'm sure that would have worked in a court of law, but I never got caught, so we don't find out. And I would sometimes palm cards in a casino game just for a few seconds and then throw it back into the muck because I was sitting right beside the dealer. I was messing around with things like that. And then one night I ended up in a thing called the Jim Baxter game in Glasgow. Glasgow, if you don't, anybody here from Glasgow? No? Nope, just me. Okay. In Glasgow, it's quite a tough town. It was actually the murder capital of the world per capita at one point. We're very proud of that. I decided that this would be a great place to do some cheating. And the Jim Baxter game was interesting on a couple of things. First of all, they had decks of cards that had apparently been used for decades. So if you really were paying attention, you didn't have to mark the cards they were already marked. At one point, Jim, the guy running the game said to me, I need to buy some cards. I just don't know where to get them. And I said, well, this will happen. I've got some cards and I'll bring them in. And it took me about a week to mark them all, reseal the decks and then give them to him. And assuming that he kept those as long as he kept the other ones, they're probably still being played at that game right now. One night in that game, I was playing a guy called Steve M. I'm just going to give you a second name, Steve M. And everybody hated this guy because first of all, he was a great poker player. Second of all, he was a world-class championship Olympic quality asshole. Okay. So he would beat you, but he would really beat you. And it was just the worst guy. And that's my only real... Yeah, I cheated him. So here's how it worked. It was kind of like a very fast tournament structure. And you would play and play and play, and people would start gravitating to the other room where cash games were going as they were kicked out of the tournament. And we ended up together the last two people in a game of seven-card stud. Now, I can play hold them. I can tell you a lot about hold them. I really don't know very much about seven-card stud, but I was having the game of my life until I ended up against Steve. And I'm sitting with Steve and the deck is being passed. There is no dealer. The deck is being passed. It's been passed from him to me. And we've got a crowd of about 10 people watching to see what happens. And as we're playing, I've got the cards. I decide to figure out, you know, I wonder what the top card of the deck is. These cards are not marked. So I have a little peek. I look. And there's a card that's going to make my hand. I'm going to make a flush. Unfortunately, that card gets dealt to Steve. Unless I don't deal that card, instead I deal the second card down. This is called the second deal. And if you come and join us in February, you'll get to see what the second deal looks like. We'll do that at length. And it's a phenomenal move. It takes years of practice. It's not really supposed to be done when you're being watched by 10 other people. Okay? However, I got the little sneaky thing that I have to get to prepare for it. I got to the point where I was going to deal that last card. And I dealt the second. And I have to say it was one of the most beautiful deals of my life. Sailed across to him. Nobody suspected a thing. I dealt that flush card to myself. And I went all in. And he beat me with a full house. And if I had not actually gone, I would have gotten the card he got, which was also a card I needed for the flush. I would have beat him had I played honestly. So, here I am, the leader of the gang who can't cheat straight. That kind of experience actually taught me a really interesting lesson. I think if I had won that night, I'd probably be in jail right now, dead or both. And I started to think about, you know, maybe this is a really bad career move for me. And then I got involved with the movie. Then I got involved with the TV show. And then things changed. And when I started doing the TV show, I began to really understand how these things worked. Because at the beginning, it fooled me completely. When you read something in a book and you say, well, that's a very clever scam, but I would never fall for that. People would probably never fall for that today. And then you go out and you do it, and suddenly people are just handing you money like this. It's a very strange experience. One of the scams we pulled was right out of a book. I think it was either the Bunkle Book or Rich Uncle from Fiji, these little booklets you can buy. And there's a scam in there it's called The Bouncer. And what happens is in the modern version is we pulled up in a truck to a marketplace. And we opened up the back of the truck and we got all these boxes behind us. The boxes are full of product. And I bring out the first product. And I say, we've got these things, whatever they were. In fact, I think it was just some pens. But it was like a whole 20 pens. And we can sell these for five pounds. Who wants these for five pounds? Each one of these could be worth two pounds 50. Imagine if you gave these out at gifts. These would be great. We get a little crowd together. People buy them. Not everybody. Some people buy them. And I say, and this is exactly what's in the book. I say, all right, you've all got that for five pounds. Who's happy? Put your hands up. Who's happy? And all these people put their hands up. And I said, if they're happy, give them their money back. And we gave them all their five pounds back. And then I reached and I got a glass vase. I remember it was a piece of junk that we bought from somewhere. I bought this glass vase. And I said, look, it's crystal. Ding. Ten pounds. And they bought it. And now more people bought it. They bought it. We gave them the pens as well. So they hadn't bought the pens the first round. Now they got the pens and they got the vats. Ten pounds. We paid pennies for these things. And I said, if you're happy, put your hand up. And they put their hand up. Give them their money back. And they all get their money back. We did the same again with something else. And finally we got to a watch. And the watch was 50 pounds. They all bought it. And I said, who's happy? And they said, we're happy. And by this point, they're shouting, we're happy. And I said, well, if you're happy, we're happy. I shut the shutter down and we drove away. Now here's the bit that still gets me. So we drove back. Real hustle worked like this. No matter what you've read, no matter what you think, we absolutely scammed those people for real. We absolutely did it for real. None of those people can act, okay? None of them are going to be able to act like they're genuinely shocked, or genuinely surprised, or genuinely upset. We really did it. But we were very clever about how long it took between them figuring out they lost all their money and us stepping in and saying, everything's okay, we're with the BBC. And I don't know what that is about that line, but it really, really works. Little aside, years later, in fact in the last season, we were filming in Scotland. As I said, Scotland's kind of an unusual place. It's the friendliest place in the world unless you really piss us off. And we had to go out and steal camera lenses. So if you're walking around with a camera lens, how much is that lens worth compared to the price of the camera? Bigger the lens, bigger the price, right? So you switch on the side, and if you grab it, turn it, you walk away, you've got thousands of pounds in your pocket. And the way we did this is we went up to tourists. The tourists were like walking around the mound in Edinburgh taking pictures of the castle and all this kind of stuff. And I would walk up and I would be bumped into by Polly, who was a girl who was working on the show in that series. And she would pretend to be lost. She'd show me a map and I'd say, excuse me, do you know where this is? She'd hold the map over the lens. I'd reach under, grab it, twist it, come away like that, right into the pocket, and I'd say maybe this guy knows, I don't really know where it, when I walk away. She'd walk away, he'd probably, and he did almost always because it was a guy we targeted, he'd watch her walk away for sad but obvious reasons. And then eventually he'd look down and realize he doesn't have a lens anymore. And it worked perfectly until one time Polly got the timing wrong, took this away, and he looked down and saw me holding his lens like this. And he grabs his camera. It was like a big Canon camera. And he is going to bury that camera in my face. There's no doubt in my mind. And I did this. I said, it's okay, I'm with the BBC. And a lot of people came out of a van, camera crew came over and to him it was like the Matrix had suddenly fallen apart. So that line really, really works. I'm with the BBC. So we pull all these scams and it's that distance between telling people they've been scammed and they're getting everything back and allowing them to have that moment of shock. That was a TV show. That was the thing we wanted to do. We didn't want to do it so that you were hurt or really upset. And we went back to those people that we had sold all that stuff to and we tried to give them the money back. And that was always a little difficult in some cases. We did a thing. If you ever want to be, especially in Europe, if you ever want to have an automatic position of authority, just go and buy one of those yellow fluorescent jackets and put it on. People automatically assume you're with somebody, you must know something and they'll do what you tell them or they'll ask you questions like, how do I get into there and you can do all sorts of things. And we did that one time by just putting an out of order sign on a parking meter in a really busy parking area. Out of order, please give the cash to the guy with the... And I stood there on a fluorescent jacket and we had runners who had to just go and get people and say, could you just stop the money you gave and we have to give it back to you. But I was so successful, we ran out of runners really quickly and so there's about a dozen people who came back and had tickets on their car with a message from us saying, please call the BBC because we're going to pay for your tickets. So it was always very difficult to do that. We went back and got those people and they've got their bags with all the junk that we've sold them. Now I guarantee there was less than three pounds worth of junk and that 50 pound back. Most of them didn't want to give it back because they really were happy. And it was the funny thing about that scam that I never really understood. They didn't feel like we conned them. They were just unhappy we didn't keep going. Right? And the reason for that is because in the back wall we had playstations and TVs and they thought we were going to keep going until we got to the playstations. So people are funny and they can be manipulated in very interesting ways and it's a system of nudging. It's how you confront people, how you come at people, depends on a lot of elements and how you play each person has to be adjusted depending on their personality and their situation. And understanding how to adapt to that is kind of what I learned in the real hustle without gaining a huge enormous criminal record. Empathy is one of the most powerful things you can use. You can of course attack somebody with a situation which makes them panic and they do something they shouldn't do. We did that all the time. But if you could gain empathy and you could get it back in return you could do almost anything that you wanted. So the scams that we did were always based on us trying to figure it out. But there's also things that even in the most outlandish of situations the craziest of ideas would work for us. So if you watch the shows, if you look up there's a model an actress called Caprice. She's American, she's very famous in the UK and she was one of our first celebrity guests so we decided to do a series where we would bring in celebrities and get them to pull the scams with us which was an absolutely idiotic idea but the audience liked it so we kept doing it. And Caprice came out and the scam was really very simple. We didn't do anything very complicated whether you just go into that shop over there and we're gonna have you pass over counterfeit money. But the system for doing it is actually pretty clever. You hand over a 50 you buy something for less than a 10 they give you a couple of 20s back and you switch to 20s and you say actually do you have 10s? And because that money seemed to come out of their till they never really examine it. Alright they just give the money over. All she had to do was buy a couple of DVDs. Underneath the DVDs were the counterfeit 20s. She took the 20s from here she took the DVDs which covered everything she held them and she took her other hand out with the other 20s and she had to say could have some 10s. We trained her how to do it that morning and then we sent her over. And she went with Jess. If you've seen the show Jess, a former model and very very good at hustle she went over with Caprice. The only thing I want to say about Jess is that Jess is really good at thinking on her feet and really good at looking after number one in these situations. Caprice got the money she took the DVDs the counterfeit cash and the woman behind the counter is looking at the DVDs where there's another couple of 20s just sticking out from underneath and she knows exactly what she did and she won't let her leave she's going to call the police. Now we can see all of this through the camera feed we have and we can also see Jess leave. She walks out the door and she doesn't even come back to where we are she leaves the entire situation she hears the word police we have to find her we have to call her Across the street there's a pub and in the pub is myself and Alex now this is our first celebrity scam it's absolutely the first one we've ever done and the situation is that our current producer who's never done the show before he has said well if you're going to meet this celebrity you should dress up in suits and ties we're like we're supposed to be on this looks like we're going for a job interview massive argument because we're on TV we're divas so we put the suit on we're on TV we meet her we tell her what to do we send her over and our stupid suits and then this thing happens and so Alex and I just don't think twice we both do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time we leave the pub and we walk over to the shop we walk in and I say hello we've been following these two girls who've been passing off counterfeit cash this is one right there and she said thank goodness you're here and I had just shown her a picture of my children she didn't look the situation just absolutely fed into what we were doing we not only actually got Caprice out of there we got more examples of the cash from her till the cash that she had given her oh this is another bad one right here we took that one as well and we walked out there's so many ways to really do this I could tell you stories forever I want to tell you my favorite scam is very very briefly everyone says what's your favorite scam the BBC used to be very afraid of what we did the reason for that is they were afraid that we were going to teach people how to be con artists I don't think there's really any truth in that because if you've got that in you you can't get it from watching TV but if you do have it in you there's a really good training course on the internet called the real hustle the truth is con artists already know how to con you and the reason they get away with it is because you don't know how they operate and you don't recognize it as a scam so we really got a lot of people telling the police that they recognize a scam because they'd seen it on the real hustle so we became part of a campaign called Scamnesty anything they saw that was maybe a scam like mail they would hand it over to the police we became the face of that I think that legitimizes what we did in all honesty but the BBC would be very careful about how we would refer to these scams so one of the things they said is that you know you can't trivialize this you know you have to always kind of apologize for what it is you're doing in a way as if it's a dangerous topic you can't say something like my favorite scam is so my favorite scam is something called the razzle and the razzle is a carnival game it's one of the greatest carnival games of all time because you can't possibly win but I can take every penny in your pocket with this game the game works like this there's a scoreboard and on that scoreboard there are a bunch of possible totals numbers like 44, 35, 24 and 29 which is an important one and you're gonna throw some marbles into a giant box in the box there are lots of little holes that the marbles can settle into these are all numbered when you do that I add up those numbers we look to see if the sum of those numbers is on the board and if it has a little point underneath it you win that point it could be 5 points, 2 points and if you get 10 points you win the big prize PlayStation, TV, Lamborghini the entire continent of America it doesn't really matter you don't have any chance of winning it but that big prize is what draws people in and they do get played at gun fairs quite often I don't know why but it does a lot of people get drawn in and the idea of the game is very simple you roll I count, you win and then you win again and you win again until you get closer and closer to that total of 10 but as you're playing not every round wins as you're playing you'll occasionally hit that 29 when you do that you have to double the bet so what starts off as a couple of pounds $32, $64 every time you hit 29 the most common number you're going to hit and it has a little thing that says HP which is house price so while we double the amount you have to play we also double the prizes so now you're playing for a PlayStation a TV, the Lamborghini, you're going to win all the Texas it's right up there doesn't really matter but we're giving you all these big prizes but you're getting closer and closer to that 10 and then you run out of money you have to run out of money when you're doubling the bets like that right when you run out of money I look around and say I've never seen this happen before but I'll tell you what I'll do you've lost about 300, 400 pounds I'm going to put that under that prize you can win that back and if you bring back another 400 pounds I'll give you 20 rolls to get that extra half point you're looking for and they always go to the ATM and they always come back I hold the score for 10 minutes when they come back I give them 20 rolls they count it all themselves and they have no chance of winning and they have no chance of winning for one simple thing and this is why it's a genius scam you can only get a winning score, one that gives you points you can only get that if I cheat on your behalf and miscount the number if I do that I can give you one of those numbers all the other ones are the ones you're going to get now it's billions and billions to one it could happen but not really because the numbers are spaced in a certain way so because of the psychology that works with that people are so certain that they're going to win that extra half point they cannot resist but go and get more money in Blackpool this was called Lucky Numbers it was a very popular holiday destination and they had to destroy the game well they had to make the game illegal because people would come for vacations for two weeks, lose all their money on the second day and literally be destitute for two weeks and it's too heavy a game possibly my second favorite will be this guy right here we don't really have enough time to do this properly this would normally be played for a longer period of time but some of you may have heard of this it's called Three Card Monty you may see it in Las Vegas believe it or not on those walkways outside the casinos you sometimes see guys setting up this game it's very unusual but it can happen in New York most people are aware of it so they target tourists in London you'll see it quite often and in Paris especially at the moment it seems to be going through our renaissance it's a game you'll see a lot it's a game with a rich history it's very very simple has anybody not seen this game before alright let me explain it so it started like this can you guys see these cards alright so if you can see that so what you have here is you have one two three Queen of Hearts you would mark one but that would make the game pretty confusing because people wouldn't really remember which one the marked one was so they changed the game a little bit the game was played with one two Queens and one Joker like this now the idea now is to follow the Joker but it's pretty hard to do most people can't actually follow that card so the game is played slightly differently now it's played with two Jokers and one Queen of Hearts watch really carefully some of you will know how this is done if I throw the cards around like this the idea is to follow that Queen I'm actually trying to show you a lot more than you would normally see I wouldn't turn the cards over quite so often as this most of you if you're watching know it's this card here right trying to help you guys it's really there one more time watch really carefully so you can see the Queen there like this any guesses middle? good guess now we'll go again one more time now here's how the game really works if I were to throw them around like this you wouldn't normally show that these cards were Jokers if you're really guessing most of you would guess the middle at this point right again the middle is where the card usually starts the problem with this game is even if you know how it works when it's being cheated if they get a smell of that in order to beat you all they have to do is stop cheating right now you can all see where the Queen is let me explain what would happen if we did this for real okay so if I were to take this card here put it here where would you say it was right now you would definitely say it was in the middle I'll slow it down one more time now look there's the card now you can clearly see there's a Joker there's another Joker some people may bet on this card here you're gonna hit a Joker here of course that's the Joker you all know where it is now right so the problem with this game is a lot of people think that you have no Queens at all sometimes you have three but I'm performing a switch and I'm gonna explain what the switch looks like the switch looks like this imagine I have the Queen in this hand which I do and I have the Joker in this hand I'm gonna throw the Queen when I throw the Queen it's not gonna land here instead I'm gonna drop this card okay it looks like this alright you get the idea now if we do that with all three cards look you know where the Queen is so there's the switch okay so you know it didn't actually go down it goes down like this you all of course know where the card is at this point some people think it's here something is here it's really right there just like that so how do you beat a game like this now guys have tried to beat the game now this guy's basically a theatrical mugger he's trying to steal your money okay so somebody may reach across and put a little bend in the card there like that can you see that so you can clearly see at this point where the Queen is so somebody would you guess where do you think the Queen is if you can see you can see the little bank card over here give you a clue it's not here there you go alright you're not very confident are you can you see the bend there see that little bend right here you don't really want to bet on that because it is possible to lose every single time this is probably my second favorite scam next year we're going to get together for the conference in February in Orlando we'll be doing a couple things first of all I will be organizing a trip to Disneyland so sign up now most importantly the kind of sleight of hand we're going to talk about is all the really cool stuff that beats casinos and beats poker games that stuff's really cool and you'll get a big kick out of it but what I'm also going to do is I'm going to apply some of that to some things that you may want to do in real life for example if someone asks you to remove the SD cards from your camera and hand it over to be confiscated I'm going to show you how to palm one and switch it in that action so nobody knows I'll bet you that's pretty handy what can you do with a USB stick what can you do what can you do with an entire laptop we're going to talk about how you can manage situations in order to hide things the way a magician might hide things just to protect your own information not to target anybody just to have the tools required to distract and gain an advantage in certain situations so that's what we're going to talk about in February I hope to see you all there I'm so sorry that we didn't have anything to show you other than a little bit of that I'm more sorry that none of you bet any money while we were doing that but more importantly thank you very much for watching take care